Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 20

The phone rang several times, and Gladys reported calls from people seeking urgent medical aid. She had just been told, she added, that the phone company was limiting their incoming long-distance calls, because so many were being placed to Cayce that others in Virginia Beach could not get lines to call out, and wartime restrictions made extra lines impossible. How, we asked, did local people see Cayce, now that his recently published biography had made him a public figure? For example, how did the priest across the way at the little Catholic church view Cayce’s efforts? Cayce grinned and suggested that we look tomorrow at the large twin candles in holders, each over three feet tall, which were placed to keep unlit vigil on either side of the outer door to his office. The priest had quietly brought them some time ago as a blessing and a protection. He had not stayed long, but his encouragement seemed heartfelt.

When we spoke of the Presbyterian Church, where Cayce had his membership (since there was no Disciple or Christian Church in the community), we turned to his Sunday morning adult Bible class there, and drew Cayce out on the passages he was currently teaching. My worst fear was that he might be a proof-texting pietist, citing Bible verses as inerrantly inspired and capable of predicting current events, as well as dictating arbitrary rules of behavior. After all, here was the first man I had met who had memorized most of the Bible.

But my fear was ungrounded. When Cayce likened the uprooting of millions in Europe and Asia to Israel’s painful exile in its time of humbling and cleansing, and when he spoke of the worldwide hunger for leadership by referring to Moses leading a wayward people through the Exodus wilderness, I could see that he looked to the full scope and weight of the biblical drama. Sin and grace met in his comments. He offered neither shallow optimism nor Calvinist gloom but a steady realism about the human heart and will. He could evoke with a photographer’s acute perception the legendary individuals in biblical accounts. But he also saw the vista of an entire people trying to serve God and failing as often as they succeeded. Here was no arbitrary fundamentalist demanding conformity to doctrinal touchstones but a man for whom the Bible was home country, peopled with ambiguous relatives of his, reported in sagas both driven and noble. When he spoke of the responsibility on all of us to use our abilities to help others, while our destinies were being weighed and spirits stretched by war, it was clear that for him biblical faith was not a smug retreat from the world, but a prod to be found worthy of that part of events entrusted to each of us.

As Cayce spoke, something familiar about him beckoned to me.

It was his resemblance to missionaries from my boyhood in China, where my parents had been educators. Those I had known best were doers, not just evangelists; they were teachers, nurses, engineers, and physicians, determined to help train the native leadership among those they served rather than make themselves indispensable. Their faith had much practical worldliness, of the sort that Cayce evinced. I could recall my father bringing home to the kitchen baby girls he found abandoned on the walls of our Chinese city, where they had been left to die because girls were so little valued; patiently he and my mother had brought them back to life. And I could still see both my parents unbinding the feet of young Chinese women, knowing that their newfound freedom of healthy movement would be bought at the price of alienation in their villages. Such missionaries thought they could make a difference in some part of the globe or in some human need which others considered hopeless. Their combination of prayer and unflagging action made them remarkably vital. Cayce seemed to have some of their stubborn goodwill and confidence. No wonder he had made it his business to recruit couples to be medical missionaries in every church where he had taught, sending them off to underdeveloped countries in what would later be called the Third World. He sent himself in his odd trance into territories of the mind and heart just as little known but marked by similar human needs.

My mother’s relish came to mind, as she told how Cayce had arranged for her to speak to the missionary society in his Presbyterian church on the occasion of her first visit. Her letters had mentioned her overseas background, and he had acted promptly. When she arrived, he announced that she was scheduled to speak to the missionary group that morning, and her protests that she had come to witness readings were useless. Cayce was quite clear on his priorities: she could hear his readings anytime, but addressing the group on overseas missions was really important.

He warmed to our exchanges, which gradually became a series of his stories, told with quietly dramatic skill and charm. Indeed, one tale followed the other so easily that he paused only briefly to draw us out. It was a pattern which (I later learned) he used deliberately, to keep himself from picking up unwanted psychic information about those before him. Sharp concentration too easily led him to read people’s minds—and he thought these were none of his business. The problem was the same, I would discover, as that which blocked him from playing bridge, though he loved the game and was good at it. Players concentrated so hard that he could read their minds, and the fun went out of his play. Finally he had taken to inventing his own card games, one of which had been the noisy bidding contest of Pit or Corner the Market, which I had often played as a youngster, as had many in my generation.¹⁴

Our conversation turned naturally to Cayce’s biography. Reporting on the strangeness of reading it in the setting of a weapons project, I studied Cayce’s face for hints of self-importance. Evidently pleased with the book, he was not so fascinated to find himself in print that he could speak of nothing else. But now that he had considerable public respectability at last, it seemed reasonable for him to be tempted by grandiosity. We were catching him at the crest of his life. If success were as much a test of a person’s mettle as failure, then we were there at the right time to discover his essential character. He would be less than human if he were not tempted to use his new position to make up for past disappointments.